On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:54:16 -0500, Rodney Myrvaagnes
wrote:


I fall in the first 50%. I might make 500 miles with nice weather.
35000 I wouldn't even start.

I would, if I could take five years and drop anchor about a hundred
times G. Oh, and I'd need rum for the captain's medicine chest.
Gosling's, preferably.

I suspect the problem is that she is popular in France as well as the
UK.

Well, I carry a British passport, so I feel qualified in saying that
is pig-ignorant. The French may have a number of easily identified
shortcomings, but they (or at least the Bretons!) are the world's
finest sailors and certainly are the nation that backs sport sailing
and participates in it to a higher degree than any other nation. I
would put the Australians/New Zealanders after the French and the
British after that. The U.S. and Canada are perhaps in the lower end
of the top ten, as I don't count the "billionaire's club" as being
representative of a thriving sailing culture so much as a plutocratic
culture that includes sailing as a way to spend millions of dollars on
"technical" races like America's Cup....the equivalent of breeding
horses to win 100 metre races, in my opinion.

I thought she should have been knighted after fixing the main in a
knockdown on the Volvo 60. I still don't see what took them so long.

She is in the same class as Yves Parlier (who cooked himself a new
spar on some desolate beach in the south Pacific) and Derek Hatfield,
who was dismasted off Argentina in an Open 40 in the last Five Oceans,
fixed the damage and *still* got a 3rd place finish despite having the
smallest and cheapest boat in his class.

Endurance is one thing, skill is another. But the pure mental grit and
determination and sheer resourcefulness shown over weeks of hardship
is what distinguishes solo distance sailing from every other sport, in
my opinion.

R.